OGC seeks public comment on candidate Sensor Model Language (SensorML) v2.1 standard

16 May 2019: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the candidate Sensor Model Language (SensorML) v2.1 standard.

SensorML is a machine-readable language for describing sensors, actuators, and processes surrounding measurement. SensorML is a key component of OGC’s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of standards. SWE is concerned with establishing interfaces and encodings that enable a “Sensor Web” through which applications and services are able to access sensors of all types - from the commonplace sensors associated with mobile phones to high-precision remote sensing platforms such as satellites - as well as the observations generated by them, over the Web.

The primary focus of the Sensor Model Language (SensorML) is to provide a robust and semantically-tied means of defining processes and processing components associated with the measurement and post-measurement transformation of observations. This includes sensors and actuators as well as computational processes applied pre- and post-measurement.

The main objective is to enable interoperability so that sensors and processes can be better understood by machines, utilized automatically in complex workflows, and easily shared between intelligent sensor web nodes.

The recently published version 2.1 of the GMLJP2 imagery standard additionally supports SensorML descriptions, thereby giving GMLJP2 the ability to support “raw” sensor model imagery. Sensor model images are useful because they contain geospatial information that is lost upon processing into rectified ‘map’ images. Besides being processed into map images, sensor model images may be used, for example, for precision mensuration or to construct 3D models of ground structures. Such physical and replacement sensor model descriptions are being compiled into a sensor model repository by the OGC Naming Authority.

The SensorML v2.1 Standard specifies a means to create a general mathematically-based model for transforming an initial state (for example, the location and orientation of a camera) to a final state (the ground point of origin of the light entering the camera) via a serial processing chain. The standard also provides an associated XML implementation. The main change of SensorML 2.1 from SensorML 2.0 is the addition of setEncodedValues in both the standard and in the XML implementation to provide a method to more concisely encode arrays, as compared to setArrayValues.

The candidate SensorML v2.1 standard is available for review and comment on the OGC Portal [.zip]. Comments are due by 14 June 2019 and should be submitted via the method outlined on the candidate SensorML v2.1 Standard’s request page.